Homesite of Dr. William Keiller

William Keiller was born at Auchindinny near Edinburgh in 1861 and took medical degrees from Edinburgh and Glasgow in 1888. He taught anatomy at UTMB for forty years from 1891, specializing in the brain and spinal cord, and students remembered his chalkboard drawings. He introduced the formalin method of preserving bodies for dissection, pioneered local anesthetics, and wrote Nerve Tracts of the Brain and Cord in 1927. The Texas Surgical Society made him its first honorary fellow in 1916. A laboratory building on the UTMB campus carries his name. He died in Galveston in 1931.

What the plaque says

Homesite of Dr. William Keiller Born in Scotland and trained at Edinburgh University, Dr. William Keiller came to Galveston in the early 1890s to serve as the first professor of anatomy at the University of Texas Medical Branch. He remained in that capacity for 40 years, but also served for a time as the school dean and as president of the Texas Medical Association. Surmounting personal physical disabilities, he became the leading American anatomist of his day. From 1922, the year after he became dean, until his death in 1931, Dr. Keiller made his home at this address with his wife and four children. (1988)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• 1892 Bishop's Palace — 0.3 mi
  Nicholas Clayton's stone house on Broadway for the railroad lawyer Walter Gresham, later home to Galveston's Catholic bishops and one of the most admired Victorian houses in the country.
• Texas Seaport Museum and the Elissa — 0.6 mi
  An iron barque launched in Aberdeen in 1877 that called at Galveston twice, ended up smuggling in the Adriatic, and was bought back from a Greek scrapyard to sail again from Pier 22.
• The Strand — 0.6 mi
  Five blocks of iron-front brick buildings near the harbor that were once called the Wall Street of the Southwest, emptied after 1900 and brought back by preservationists from the 1960s.
• 1859 Ashton Villa — 0.8 mi
  A brick Italianate house on Broadway, built with enslaved labor in 1859, whose lawn has held Galveston's Juneteenth commemoration of General Orders, No. 3 every year since 1979.

More markers nearby

• Dominican Sisters Congregation of the Sacred Heart — steps away
• Jean Lafitte — steps away
• Near Campsites of Louis-Michel Aury and Francisco Xavier Mina — 0.2 mi
• George Washington Chapter - DAR — 0.3 mi